In the First Reading from the Book of 2Maccabees we have an excerpt from the story of The Martyrdom of a Mother and her Seven Sons. This event would have taken place at the time of the Greek occupation of Israel under the ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the 2nd century BCE. As an attempt to unify the territories of his massive conquests, Antiochus was forcefully coercing the people now under Greek rule to conform to his Hellenistic culture which included giving up their religious beliefs.
The details of the story may seem absurd to someone living in our contemporary society – that a mother and her seven sons would suffer torture and execution instead of defying their dietary restriction to consume pork according to the Law given to Moses by God.
However, to this mother and her sons consuming a forbidden food would have meant much more than disobeying one of the commandments of the Lord. It would have meant they were giving up everything that the Law of Moses stood for – their monotheistic belief in the one, true God and the choice of Israel to be a holy nation and beacon to the world. They would have simply become another group among the many pagan nations.
In the face of condemnation, the mother and her sons stay true to their convictions and show very little fear. This is because they firmly believe in a concept that would have given them hope. It is the bodily resurrection of the dead, a relatively late belief in the history of Judaism as found within the Old Testament. Not once during their trials do they waver because they know the truth as confessed with one brother’s dying breath, “The King of the universe will raise us up to live again forever” (2Macc. 7:9).
In the corresponding gospel from Luke the Sadducees, religious leaders who deny the belief in the resurrection, pose a question to Jesus in order to try to trick him in the interpretation of the Law. According to Levirate Marriage (Deut. 25:5-10), if a man dies and leaves his widow childless his brother is required to marry the woman in order to keep her offspring’s property in the family.
In the riddle posed to Jesus the woman loses, perhaps reminiscent of the brothers in the book of Maccabees, seven husbands, none of which produce an heir. The Sadducees ask Jesus: “Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?” (Lk. 20:33a). In their denial of the resurrection, the Sadducees falsely assume that the rules of life on earth will govern the conditions of the afterlife.
Jesus corrects their misunderstanding: “Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given to marriage…for they are like angels” (Lk. 20:35-36a). This is not to say that in the coming age we will not enjoy the relationships that we have had with our spouses, other family members, or friends. Rather there will be no need for concern over legal rights and property ownership.
In our glorified spiritual bodies of the resurrection there will be no such worries over the things of the physical world. And of the three things that remain – faith, hope, and love (1Cor. 13:13) – neither will faith nor hope be needed, for all things will be realized through Christ. The only thing that will remain is love. This is the truth of the resurrection that the brothers of 2Maccabees believe as they face death and which Jesus promises us is in the gospel.
